Norman Rockwell's Late Work

Norman Rockwell moved from New Rochelle, New York, to Arlington, Vermont, in nineteen thirty-nine, and the move remade his work in ways he could not have predicted. He hired his neighbors as models for the Saturday Evening Post covers that had defined his reputation since the nineteen twenties, and the result was something genuinely different from what he had been doing before: the faces were real, the people were specific, the fireman and the druggist and the schoolchildren were from this particular small town. His Four Freedoms series of nineteen forty-three, which illustrated Franklin Roosevelt's articulation of the freedoms worth fighting for, used Arlington neighbors as the faces of American democracy. The paintings became some of the most reproduced images of the Second World War.

Then came the nineteen sixties, and the civil rights movement, and the work Rockwell could not publish in the place he had published everything else.

The Problem We All Live With was completed in nineteen sixty-four. It shows a young Black child in a white dress being escorted to school by federal marshals, walking past a wall smeared with a racial slur and a splattered tomato. It is based on the experience of Ruby Bridges, who integrated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in nineteen sixty. Rockwell brought it to the Saturday Evening Post, which had published his work for forty-seven years. The Post declined. Look magazine published it instead, to substantial public attention.

Rockwell had spent his career at the Post depicting an idealized white America, a country of church suppers and country doctors and boys fishing in summer. The civil rights paintings were his public act of acknowledging what that idealization had required him to leave out. He was in his seventies. He did not return to the idealized version.